©Sophie Stocking, 2019
All rights reserved
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Thistledown Press Ltd.
410 2nd Avenue North
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3
www.thistledownpress.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Corridor nine / Sophie Stocking.
Names: Stocking, Sophie, 1966- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190137452 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190137460 | ISBN 9781771871815 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771871822 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771871839 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS8637.T616 C67 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Cover painting by Sophie Stocking
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.
To my family, past and present
BUNE WAITS. THE CLOUD GOWN catches on the calloused tips of his fingers, and moves of its own accord, whispering over the tops of his feet. He’s always questioned the uniform, the diaphanous robe in such silly contrast to his gnarled self. Who made these decisions anyhow? He scans the Membrane before him, a screen of light a scant ten feet tall, sandwiched between the smooth green turf on which he stands and the grey ceiling. The Membrane stretches out of his vision on either side, flickering and bellying slightly as if blown from behind by a weak and erratic breeze. It’s the ceiling he finds the most oppressive when working on Corridor Nine, it makes flight impossible, and his folded wings itch with the limitation. The Membrane gives the only light.
The Truant could come from anywhere, and Bune melds himself to the limitless stretch of Corridor Nine to feel for some discordant tremor. Then he smells the approach; a pungent mix of coffee, self-pity, diarrhea and despair. He always smells them before he feels them coming in. The disturbance vibrates some fifty fathoms east of him and is penetrating fast. Bune longs to use his wings but the ceiling won’t allow it, and for the moment before he musters the energy to shoot himself towards the rupture site, he questions why. Why this tidal pull of dedication that keeps bringing him back to Corridor Nine? This one is a trickster, a riddler, a loophole seeker, and he may remember the terrain, and even Bune himself, from their last go-round. Bune sucks propellant from his endless past, all his memories of horsepower and steam, and fills himself. This way of moving, just blasting one’s self to another location is faster than flying but allows no change of course en route. He has the coordinates pinned down as accurately as possible. He sets his focus on the disturbance, gathers himself, and fires.
Fabian
Blackness engulfs him and then he shatters, shards of himself ripping away in all directions. Clinging to his memory of sentient selfhood, he ricochets through space and tries to draw the shards together. The black perforates him. He must make himself whole again. He clenches his memory of teeth, and then unbelievably he begins to coalesce, the shards coming together to form a jagged unfocussed human cloud. Conceit returns first, then more of his traits click into place. His outline fuses. First and most important he has a name, Fabian, and second, he has succeeded in a brilliant escape.
The black now obeys him; it respects his rapidly thickening skin and stays outside the perimeter. His perimeter. He traces it, reinforcing his wholeness. Now he no longer rockets through space but flies slowly. He opens his eyes; he has eyes again and sees more than just black. Far ahead of him a plane of light glows. Fabian rises urgently towards it, like a bubble firing from the murk to explode through the skin of the water. Memory overwhelms him. Hitting that plane of light, over and over, seven times, the impact more painful than a belly flop. He jerks away in terror, flails, and realizes he can slow himself and even move sideways, though the plane of light still pulls him with great certainty. It can’t be refused. But then he remembers swimming! He kicks his legs like a frog and shoots sideways. The motion is like those dreams of flying, where you can push off with your toes and decide to go where you like. Fabian laughs for sheer joy and kicks some more, pulls with his arms, and begins to fly in swooping curves, and arabesques. So cleverly, so freely he flies and then he remembers again. Some ominous authority, imprisonment, waits for him behind the light. It will try to catch him as soon as he breaks through and must be avoided at all costs. Fabian picks a direction, although up or down doesn’t exist here, only the black and the light barrier. He swims with all his might, trying to get as far from his original trajectory as possible, and watches the barrier closing in on him. Just before impact, a voice in what used to be his head, says distinctly “tuck and roll.” Fabian curls his frog self into a ball and ruptures the plane of light with his shoulder.
Bernadette
Bernie drives home and tries to absorb all the connotations to “first day of school”. It is the first day of grade one for her last two children, twins Louie and Moira. The older two, Lola and Eben started grade five and eight today, on this too-quiet culmination of thirteen years. Thirteen years of self-erasing, sleep destroying, skin-to-skin frustration, tenderness, boredom, and revelation. She stuck it out all the way, pulled it off, and they are launched now, really quite successfully launched. More had been required of her, to stretch and hold fast, to endure, to consider the other before herself, to delay gratification, more than any other endeavor of her life. Her previous career a shadow in its efforts. So where, thinks Bernie, when she walks out of the school, onto the dusty silence of the sundrenched gravel, swings creaking in the wind, where is the goddamned band?
Bernadette pulls into the driveway, turns off the motor and lets herself into the back door. Angus dances his greeting. The chaos of early morning breakfast and lunch preparation encrusts every counter. The kitchen has assumed the odd gloom of a home vacated; the vapor of her children’s being still hangs in the air but has cooled and grown dank. How she loves them, how she misses them, but how gloriously glad she is that they are all finally at school. She is amazed that she can contain both these feelings so fully and at the same time. Bernie walks around the house crying and throwing open windows to let in the air of autumn. It is infused with all she has brought to fruition, but filled as well with the possibilities of things to come. She does not know what to do.
She could take a nap. She never sleeps very well before the first day of school and last night was no exception. She could go to her studio and sort out all the camping gear and old bikes and donate them to the bicycle shop. Turn the studio back into a place where she can work, but to open that long dead possibility seems perilous. How will her postponed battened down ambition erupt? Better to pursue lesser desires for awhile. Maybe she should do some volunteer work. Take up banjo lessons? Buy a gym membership, or get accredited as a yoga instructor? Become a potter as well as a painter or, or, or? Bernie knows she is doing what her friend Marilyn did when her kids went back to school, getting the bends in this sudden vacuum. Louise ended up a chronic volunteer for her children’s extracurricular sports and let the rest of her time be cannibalized by the tyranny of the Parent Teacher Association. Breathe, Bernie tells herself, stay calm, go slow. She decides to do the dishes and then clean out the fridge.
Bune and Fabian
Bune arrives at the rupture site in the tornado o
f his swirling grey self. He stretches his wings out behind him to relieve the cramping, hardly sufficient, and waits. His myriad draperies, scraps, and leaves of cloud that enrobe him, swirl one way around him, then the other. Where is the Truant? He should only have preceded him by a few seconds. Bune jerks as he feels the Membrane rupture somewhere behind him. He whirls around. In the far distance he watches an inverted lesion pierce the Membrane. A bullet of a child jettisons through the orifice. Bune starts to run, he must keep him in sight. The little pink being uncurls as he flies through the grey space, cartwheeling and flailing, fighting against the rotation to regain his feet. Bune runs at top speed, trying to contain himself beneath the tight ceiling and only propel himself forward.
At the same time, Fabian’s feet make contact with the mossy turf of Corridor Nine. He rebounds, his immense velocity throws him forward, then he touches down again like an astronaut on the moon. He bounces and stumbles and rolls until finally coming to rest in a small heap. The turf beneath his cheek, pressing against his naked abdomen, his thighs, and chest feels like cool velvet and smells of verdure, every green and leafy thing that ever grew. He inhales deeply and rests.
“Free at last, free at last,” he thinks. “I escaped the whole mess, I found the secret door.” Bune slows to a walk; now close enough that escape for the Truant is impossible. He watches him acclimatize, staying just back of sight.
The Truant sits up on the turf and looks at himself. He examines his new form; the sturdy little satin skinned body of a boy of three or four. He hugs himself in delight, counts each pink finger and toe; he realizes he feels perfectly warm all over with no need of clothes. He tests the elasticity and strength of his muscles, cackles as he somersaults, then with the control of a gymnast pushes to a handstand. Here he stays looking up at his dangling penis, and then he shouts with joy and does a handspring to his feet. Fabian sticks out his hips and lo, he didn’t have to leave it behind! He has all the old equipment, the red and wrinkled overgrown scrotum of a man, with a lolling dangerous inflatable penis to match. He had been rather well endowed in his last incarnation. Yes!
If only, if only . . . his four-year-old paws start patting and feeling his head. Did he get to bring that too? He feels the narrow receding chin, the soft stubble-free skin, and little button nose. Quickly he ascertains the enlarged conical form of his skull. Its overgrown proportions can mean only one thing. His brain! He got to bring the brain! His own brilliant grownup brain! Fabian feels like a child on Christmas morning who could ask for nothing more. He kneels and presses his cheek into the fragrant turf and realizes that he feels no hunger, no satiety, or even memory of food. With a hand he feels between his buttocks for a rectum and to his amazement finds nothing but closed skin, a continuation of the perineum. He lies down on his back and thinks. No digestive system. How wonderful. Free from the unrelenting dictatorship of hunger, the constant feeding, the accumulating shit and constipation, and on the other end of the spectrum the vomiting and diarrhea. His digestive system had caused him untold trouble. His eyes open and he stares around him. The monotone grey space shows no variation in opacity or transparency, nothing to obscure or hide behind, no cloud or drifting fog. The atmosphere waits, completely unvarying in its emptiness. How far does it stretch? Ten feet above the grey ceiling hovers. He wonders what the dull surface is made of. To his left and right the barrier of light continues to either side of him and out of sight. If he turns his back to the light wall, the grey, and the ceiling and velvet turf recede into indeterminable darkness. He hears only static humming and the occasional crackle of the wall.
Fabian feels no hunger and therefore no urgency to search for food. But he still longs for mental stimulation and potential mates. How will he find them? He starts to walk away from the light across the velvet ground, tries to walk in a straight line so that it will be easy to find his way back. He walks and walks towards the dark, but nothing changes, he can find no other barrier or wall, no landmark, certainly no lifeforms. The only difference is an increasing gradient to black. He turns back and is relieved to see the ribbon of light along the horizon. He runs towards it. Here gravity is less strict than his memory of it, and he takes long floating leaps. Because his small body is so coordinated and skillful, he does a series of back flips and somersaults. How fabulous. He remembers being in his old body; the struggle and repetition required learning any new skill, and his particular lack of genetic athleticism. He remembers the migraines, bloating and constipation, how bad his knees got by the end, crackling and popping, his blurry vision. This new body offers total freedom, he has only to think of an action and it’s as good as done.
He could dance if he wanted, those women he failed to satisfy at various proms and discos should see him now. He conjures up a ballerina in his head and jetés left, jetés right, glissades forward and back, and does a pirouette. Ah, Baryshnikov watch out. Fabian begins to spin in place on one toe. It’s not so hard. He spins in a faster and faster vortex and lifts his leg behind him high over his head, arching his back and holding his foot with his hands. He lets the rotations slow, slides forward on one knee and takes a bow, his forehead pressing into the fragrant turf. Silence. No applause, the light wall only whispers and hums.
Fabian remembers his extreme mediocrity as a guard in basketball, his five-foot-eight stature, and how he had never made a team after high school. He wants to show them now, if only he had a hoop and a basketball and a somewhat higher ceiling. He jumps straight up and pretends to dunk, he levitates so quickly he puts his hands up and pushes back against the ceiling to not crack his head. But the ceiling feels like grey rubber and gives way with the impact. He couldn’t have hurt himself if he wanted to. “Watch me,” Fabian thinks, “watch me now!” He jumps twenty times, vertical leaps to the ceiling. All those fucking six-foot black ball players, beat that! Not even winded, he sits down on the turf. The light wall shifts and glows in silence.
Bune smiles and watches Fabian in his new body. About now, he thinks, the novelty will fade and the reality of Corridor Nine will settle in: the ceiling, the turf, the Membrane to one side, the darkness to the other, and no exit. The horror of this will mitigate the horror of reunion with Bune. He wonders about the pros and cons of some small, nonthreatening noises, or if he should catch him unawares. Perhaps rustling or the noise of a summer wind? Yes, something the Truant would be drawn to, something familiar and friendly. Bune settles on an assortment of birdcalls at a gentle volume, and begins to advance.
Bernadette
Bernie empties the dishwasher and starts to load the dirty dishes from the overflowing sink. Angus hovers hopefully. She puts the kids’ plates with remnants of scrambled eggs down on the floor for him to lick off. Angus is the prewash cycle.
“It’s just you and me now, bud” she says to him. “You and me for seven hours a day, five days a week.” Angus finishes the eggs and sits looking up into her face. Bernie got him from the pound three years ago, after he was rounded up off the Stoney Nation Reserve. Angus looks like the Egyptian jackal god Anubis and is probably a Border collie mix. He smiles up at her now, if a dog could smile, his coyote ears at attention. Glossy and black, his only marking is a white patch on his chest that Lola pointed out looks just like the letter pi. She scratches him behind the ears and he genuflects to downward dog. Bernie obliges, locking his head between her calves she bends over and scratches with both hands up and down his sides. When she’s done Angus shakes, glances out the open kitchen door and takes off with a frantic clattering of nails against the linoleum in highspeed pursuit of a squirrel below the bird feeder. This and prewashing dishes are his two greatest passions.
Bernadette turns back to the sink and loads cups and bowls into the dishwasher, scours out the frying pan and the stock pot after transferring last night’s Moroccan stew into Tupperware. She scrubs the sink with cleaner until the stainless-steel gleams pristine. For fifteen minutes more, she works on the kitchen, de-cluttering, recycling, throwing out, and wiping counters.
Soft air blows in from the doorway. The kitchen is now as calm and immaculate as the sink. She takes a deep breath and relaxes into the odd lack of chaos. Housework feels almost luxurious when done in blissful silence. Next the fridge. Perhaps, though this has never been a pressing ambition, she will become one of those women with a clean fridge.
Bernie opens the fridge and pulls out the produce drawers, behind which salad dressing spilled long ago, and has turned into a leathery adhesive coating. She scrapes this off with a knife, wipes up bread crumbs, desiccated greenery and puddled remains of mouldy fruit, and then starts pulling plastic containers of unknown vintage from the deepest bowels. The unending food and feeding. Twice a week she fills this fridge until she can barely close it, and then in three days her children and husband empty it and complain of nothing to eat. Her head is way under a shelf as she contemplates a bottle of Jerk Seasoning. She thinks she brought it with them when they first moved here six years ago. Why does she keep this stuff? None of her children imbibe Jerk anything. Suddenly, the doorbell rings. Bernie jumps and whacks her head on the shelf, while Angus goes ballistic. Backing out of the fridge, she wipes her hands on her jeans as she walks to the front door. Through the frosted glass she sees the outline of the UPS deliveryman, no doubt bringing some back-to-school clothes she’d ordered for the twins.
“Just a minute” she shouts, “I’ll just lock up the dog.” Angus can’t be trusted with anyone in a uniform, especially the postman. Bernie drags him by the collar and closes him in her bedroom. She goes back and opens the door, but the deliveryman is not in the brown UPS uniform, instead he wears navy. It dawns on her that he is a policeman holding his hat in both hands against his chest. “Oh,” she says.
“Excuse me Ma’am. My name is Sergeant Johnson. I am looking for a Bernadette Macomber.”
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